Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, the Metalanguage of Race, and the Genealogy of Black Feminist Legal Theory

Abstract

AbstractThis article examines Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s “metalanguage of race” as a black feminist legal theory of racism. It demonstrates how Higginbotham’s essay exposes racism’s far-reaching effects on the construction of other social and power relations by looking primarily at the ways in which the law helped to solidify the power of white supremacy in the United States. I argue that the signal contribution of Higginbotham’s essay, its concept of the metalanguage of race, is part of a genealogy of black feminist legal theorizing that recognizes the role of race in determining the meanings of gender. Higginbotham and other black feminist legal thinkers such as Kimberle Crenshaw and Pauli Murray have created a black feminist interpretive practice attentive to the contradictions and connections between race and other relations of power and difference. Indeed, the consideration of the contradictions and connections in the courts’ understanding of race and gender brings us some of our most prominent and...